Iurii Trifonov achieved public prominence in the early 1970s with his cycle of novellas that described, often in withering satirical detail, the lives, loves, and moral anxieties of the Moscow intelligentsia. As a writer who concentrated on byt (the minutiae of everyday life), he was both celebrated and criticized in the Soviet periodical press, while Western scholars knew him as a writer who pushed back the borders of what was permissible--at a time when Soviet dissidents were being jailed or exiled, and many writers were not being published at all. But Trifonov's body of work cannot be reduced simply to several novellas (the "Moscow cycle," as critics have called them) written between 1969 and 1975, for he also wrote historical novels, travel sketches, and "stream of consciousness" narratives, trying to come to terms with the turbulent century in which he lived.

Iurii Valentinovich Trifonov was born on 28 August 1925 in Moscow...